Hi friends 👋 , Happy Friday and welcome back to our 193rd Weekly Dose of Optimism. The sun is shining, the birds are chirping, Demis is going to solve all disease, Varda is making space drugs, pancreatic cancer keeps getting punched in the mouth, we’re turning whole rocket upper stages into space data centers, and the IPO window is OPEN. Y’all mind if the optimists have another good week? Let’s get to it. We celebrate ambitious companies every week in the Dose, but ambitious also means long odds, and not every ambitious company ends the same way. Some shut down. Some sell assets. Some get acquired. Some simply reach the point where winding down is the right move.But however a company ends, there are still final steps to handle: state filings, investor communications, distributions, compliance requirements, asset decisions, and remaining obligations.SimpleClosure helps founders bring structure to closure, so the process is handled clearly, responsibly, and without becoming another months-long burden.Whether you’re actively winding down or trying to understand what comes next, SimpleClosure can help.1Learn MoreI recently read Sebastian Mallaby’s book on Demis Hassabis and DeepMind, The Infinity Machine, after having already watched the documentary on DeepMind’s development of AlphaFold, The Thinking Game, and a big takeaway for me is that you don’t want to bet against Sir Demis. In addition to DeepMind, now part of Google, Demis spun out a bio-focused company called Isomorphic Labs whose mission, right there on the homepage, is to “Solve All Disease.” As of today, they have $2.1 billion more in the anti-disease arsenal thanks to a Series B led by Thrive Capital with participation from Google vehicles Alphabet, GV, and CapitalG, and sovereign vehicles, MGX, Temasek, and the UK’s Sovereign AI Fund. It is the second largest biotech round ever, after Jeff Bezos and Yuri Milner’s AltosLabs came out with $3 billion in 2022.Back in Dose #180, we covered IsoDDE, Isomorphic Labs’ unified AI drug design engine that crushed AlphaFold 3 on the hardest protein-ligand benchmarks and, in one of the more striking results, rediscovered cereblon’s second binding pocket from sequence alone, an achievement it took human researchers 15 years to confirm experimentally. Our take then was that the engine was real but the proof would come when AI-designed molecules actually entered humans. The money will go towards that, with the first of their wholly-owned drug candidates expected to enter human trials at the end of this year, and to expand the pipeline, continue to improve IsoDDE, and keep hiring the very best talent. While there are a number of companies promising to solve drug discovery with AI, Isomorphic Labs seems to have the track record, talent, and war chest to do it. Nobel Laureate Sir Demis Hassabis has a history of planning to do things that sounded crazy at the time and then doing them, and the craziest part is that if he does it again this time, the thing that sounds crazy that he will actually pull off is solving all disease. God Save the Queen, and all of us as well. Sana Pashankar for BloombergIsomorphic seems promising for Earth Drugs. But what about Space Drugs? Way back in June 2023, almost three years ago, I wrote a Deep Dive on not boring capital portfolio company Varda in which we discussed its plans to manufacture drugs in space, where the lack of gravity lets you do things you can’t on earth, and send them back down to earth, where the people who need them are. After three years of launches and re-entries with defense customers, the company is igniting stage 2 of the plan: start testing space drug manufacturing. This week, it announced a partnership with $25B publicly-traded pharmaceutical company, United Therapuetics, to “explore the use of microgravity in creating drugs for chronic diseases in a deal that could prove out the value of in-space development for the pharmaceutical industry.” United makes drugs to treat cancer and high blood pressure in the lungs, and it’s expected that this partnership will start by testing molecular samples of drugs intended to treat lung diseases specifically. That’s one big step for Space Drugs, and one potentially giant leap for mankind.Ruxandra Teslo for Works in Progress Pancreatic cancers surround themselves with a physical barrier that helps them escape immune attack. Adapted from here. PDAC = pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma; TAM = tumor associated macrophage; CAF = cancer associated fibroblast.Back on earth… it’s been a bad few weeks for pancreatic cancer, which means it’s been a great few weeks for humans. We led off Dose #190 with a pancreatic cancer mRNA vaccine, Dose #191 with pancreatic cancer-detecting AI, and now, Ruxandra Teslo drops a banger on a different pancreatic cancer fighting drug, Revolution Medicines’ daraxonrasib. Last month, Revolution shared daraxonrasib’s Phase 3 results. The oral, once-daily pill roughly doubled median survival for metastatic pancreatic cancer, pushing it to 13.2 months. More importantly, it represents a new class of drugs that use a “molecular glue” strategy to hit targets that don’t offer the usual drug-binding pocket. Daraxonrasib targets RAS, a cancer-driving protein found in roughly 25% of human cancers and more than 90% of pancreatic cancers, long considered “undruggable.” This isn’t a cure, but it is a crack, an early sign of the undruggable becoming druggable.Go read Ruxandra’s excellent essay. Get fucked, cancer. BloombergThe InformationDo you feel that breeze? That’s the IPO window, baby. It’s wide open. Yesterday, fast inference chipmaker Cerebras had a very successful IPO, pricing well above initial range at $185, and then closing 68% above that. Bill Gurley has got to be conflicted… on the one hand, the man hates when a company leaves money on the table in an IPO. On the other, his old firm, Benchmark, is going to make an extraordinary ~$5 billion+ at the $311 opening day closing price. Fervo, the geothermal company whose S-1 we covered recently, also IPO’d this week. Its shares popped 33% on Day 1 from its $27 price, and then jumped another 11% today.Look, things are a little frothy. I’m not buying Cerebras at $311. But we love to see tech companies win, but I’m also just psyched to see some liquidity flow back to LPs to flow back into venture to fund the next batch of companies whose IPOs we’ll cover right here in the Dose in ~8-10 years. Plus… In older recent tech IPO news, Figma defied the SaaSpocalypse / Anthropic design plugin narrative by crushing its first quarter financial results. The stock popped 8%. Not dead. Dylan Field@zoinkQuick update: not dead.